All the coins in my shop, The Penny Store, are certified circulated; what that means is that they are absolutely guaranteed to be used business-strike coins that have been lifted out of circulation, where they’ve been since they were minted or shortly thereafter. I say “shortly thereafter” because they are beautiful. Some are bright and shiny, as if they’d just popped out of the mint machine. Others are amber, honey, mahogany and drenched with an unusual and hard-to-find eye-pleasing inner glow and natural patination. Still others have something weird going on with them, or they’re victims of Mint Error, which generally translates into market value and desirability. In any case, each and every one of these coins will make you stop and stare and wonder “How in the world did you get here?”
At the moment, I’ve taken a short break from my workbench, where I’ve been sorting flipped “Pocket Change” coins and sorting them into little Mystery Grab Bags — the flipped coins are loaded into beautiful sparkly (and rather costly, but worth every penny) voile pouches, a pretty sight for anyone to see.
Each and every one of the unusual pennies I wrap into the gift packs is beautiful and/or unusual and rare.
If you’re one of those who has never noticed that there’s a date on the penny, you’ll be advised of the date right on the flip — I’ve hand-inscribed each flip with the information on that specific coin. I’m currently spending an average of 14 hours a day to get these coins to you.
The coins are truly astonishing. You’ll agree that those coins could not possibly have reached the present time undamaged, and you’d be right. They are indeed “impossibles”, and I call them that every time one drops into my lap, figuratively speaking.
When you get the coins, I ask you to do the math, and be amazed.
Most folks have never actually looked at a penny. They couldn’t tell you what’s on it to save their lives.
On the average, they don’t have a clue that there’s a person’s profile portrait on the penny, or that it’s Lincoln, or that there’s a date and possibly a mint-mark on the obverse, or that the penny might have a mint error or be a rare issue or that the word “Liberty” is to the left of Lincoln’s portrait, or that the Memorial on the back might have some oddities to it, or that the designer’s initials were left off, or that the mint-mark was doubled or that there was clash on the field.
None of this would make any sense.
Consequently, if they actually held a $1,600,000 MS-70 1909-S VDB in their bare hands, they’d be totally unimpressed. To them, it looks no different than a 2012-D out of the mint roll, and they’d be right, because they’re looking at it with uninitiated eyes.
You are on the way to initation.
Here’s what that means, specifically:
You start out ignorant. Ignorant does not mean “stupid”. There is no cure for stupid. Ignorant simply means that you don’t know something or don’t know about something and don’t yet realize that you don’t know it.
Ignorance comes from the root, “ignore”, meaning to not even wonder about it, as if the thing didn’t exist at all.
That’s the common condition. We tend to know about or inquire about only those things that are actually in our faces, those things required for our survival and pleasure and avoidance of pain.
Ask Claude to vent his feelings about people and their computers. He’ll tell you with some heat that people know nothing outside the few miserable feeble steps they know to take to get done what they need done on the computer, and nothing more.
No inquiry. No sense of wonder. No curiosity. Not even a glint of recognition or question. Nothing. Why? It’s of no concern right now, so it’s woven into the background as just another part of the general blur.
“Ye shall become as little children.” What else can that refer to other than the “Sense of Wonder” made famous by the biggest, oldest kid of all, my lifetime friend and literary agent, Forry Ackerman, owner of the Ackermansion and editor of Famous Monsters magazine, which most of you have never read or heard of, and that’d be right in line with my premise.
You don’t really need to know about Famous Monsters of Hollywood in order to survive right now, unless you’re the proud owner of Murray’s Famous Hollywood Monsters Costume Shop in Peoria, Illinois.
If you are the owner, please come down to the shop right away. I need to purchase another Darth Vader helmet; this one’s developed a slow leak.
But I digress.
You have to have the Spirit of Inquiry. Questing. Questioning. Asking the right questions. Learning the right way to ask the right questions. Not being satisfied with evasive answers.
So in crafting up these little mystery surprise grab bags, I am forced to take into account the ignorance of the average receiver of said gift.
A sad state of affairs.
I would gladly include a rich, honey glow 1955-S MS-66 in the NOVICE package, but I can’t, and I’ll tell you why I can’t.
It would look to the average person like “just another penny” and what’s more, if it’s shiny, it’s assumed that it has to be new, recently issued, if the thought occurs to them at all. Typically, it won’t.
I’ve given pennies to hundreds of local folks to see their reactions; given them as gifts, you know, for Christmas, birthday, etc.
They frankly can’t tell the difference between one coin and another, let alone one penny and another. So I make up the Novice Pack with shiny Lincoln Memorials and a few BROWN wheaties. I don’t want to do it that way, but according to all the folks I’ve talked to in the past few years on this subject, showing them a variety of pennies, the fact is that nobody who is ignorant of numismatics thinks older coins should be bright and shiny.
In fact, they’re of the belief that the older the coin looks, the more it’s worth.
Scary? I’ll say it is. On my home world, it wouldn’t happen like this, but here on this particular planet, it seems to happen all the time. Sad and scary, but we off-worlders all have to deal with it, so here’s my best shot:
I made a “Novice” grab bag.
Nothing in there to worry about, nothing to lose, nothing expensive, and the grab bag is cheap, just $20 retail, which means the wholesale to you is only $10, but the catch is that you have to buy at least 5 at a time to make it worth while stopping everything to handle your “deal”.
That’s what they’re called in the coin trading field; “deals”. You’ll find them on cable and satellite tv all the time, and these are no less “deals” than they are, and probably a whole lot more educational.
Educational in the sense that you’re slowly getting less and less ignorant on at least one subject, and this sort of self-training tends to bleed over into other avenues as well.
Think of a Black Hole as a sort of Cosmic Dribble Glass.
Now imagine that Black Holes form tornado-like funnels between flat universes such as this one, which we’ll call “L415a” for lack of a better name at the moment, although I could come up with a few Galactic Federation names for the universe that seem to be ubiquitous in the Western Rim.
Find a common name for any one universe in the Multiverse? No way, can’t be done. Not only do we all speak different languages, we think different thoughts, and even on a single planet such as yours — pardon me, “ours” — there are thought-variants galore amongst a single species, “homo sapiens sapiens”, to name one example.
So if I plunked into this little bag something like, say, a 1934-D in MS 60, would your recipient be aware that this is on the order of a $100 gift, just that coin alone?
Probably not, and the coin could easily end up in a Salvation Army Thrift Shop or worse, and that’s my main concern.
I really don’t care what the recipient knows about the value of the gift except that they will have no “respect” for the coin unless they are made aware of the cash value, and that’s a sad fact of life, but really, it’s true. Only two things will make someone guard the coin as a keepsake, and that’s Sentimental Value and Cash Value, and my bet is on the Cash Value, and I’ll tell you why:
When the coin has passed through a few more hands over the next few generations, the sentimental value won’t hold the market value in place. In short, nobody else gives a damn about your sentiments, and that’s a fact, and you shouldn’t either, but that’s fodder for another dissertation, if dissertation this may be.
So what coins can I put in there that will have any meaning to the average recipient?
Actually, there is no “right answer” to this question, because you can’t possibly plumb the depths of human ignorance, and looking at coins falls well within the spectrum of blissful unawareness that lies just below the surface of the top of the head of the average homo sap. The only way to deal with it is to ignore the ignorant, otherwise I won’t be able to put anything in there but the coins people expect…
What would that be?
They’d assume the bright, shiny pennies to be new, and the brownies to be old, and they’ll tend to believe that the older ones are automatically worth more than the newer ones, and I’ll bet dollars to donuts that’s exactly the conclusion you’ll come to, after a few sad experiences trying to get people excited about pennies.
You can’t.
They don’t need pennies in order to survive right now, therefore, pennies don’t exist. The only use for a penny is to make exact change. These are people who have to carry a piece of paper tucked into their wallet that tells them their PIN number.
But if you could convince them that pennies would help them survive better, would they lift a finger? Would they leap up out of their couches and flock to the coinology temple?
You can win many a bar bet with the answer to that, because the answer is a resounding “no”. Why? Because they’re not convinced that they need to survive better. Only at that point could they decide on a path. You first have to realize that there’s somewhere to go.
Anyhow, I was trying to work out which pennies I’d include in the mystery gift packs and such, and I came up with the plan to offer several levels of gift packs.
First of all, each pack will be made up individually as I feel like doing it, totally by instinct. Since all the coins are self-found in pocket change, the only cost to me is personal time, attention, writing cramps and ID & grading approximations plus, of course, the loss of income represented by the difference between the market value and what you pay.
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Money means nothing — I’m 71 in a few days, and have enough to continue my work and legacy, and that’s all I care about. I’m serious when I say money means nothing.
I want to put coins into these mini-collections that actually blow peoples’ minds with their sheer impossibility of being here in the condition they’re in!
But I also want to make special coins available; coins that require initiation and knowledge, and of those I have plenty and to spare. I have already isolated most of the coins that will go into the coinology museum exhibits both online and in brick & mortar.
What I would like, bottom line, is for everyone who reads this to send for one $10 Mystery Grab Bag and trust me to send you a mind-blowing group of 5 flipped coins that have been ID’d and notated as to what they are, where they come from and why they’re so cool.
I’m also making Super Grab Bags with just amazing brights and honey ambers in grades that will astonish you if you know how to read grade!
If you don’t, you’ll have to find out, because I promise you, you won’t believe it.
These coins are IMPOSSIBLE, and that’s what I call them: “Impossibles”. They can be ordered separately — they don’t come in the ordinary gift packs. You can call to find out more about these, and to get the dealer prices on all these “time capsule” products.
You are helping me to distribute little “legominism” messages to the future in these Hermetically Sealed Archival Fully Notated Time Capsules.
The $10 covers the cost of paying folks to do the parts of this operation that I can’t, such as the printing, design and workouts of the texts, visual and opticals, camera and titles, all that sort of thing. I have all the fun — sorting coins, writing up the ID on flips, comparing weirdnessess in thousands of oddball coins that couldn’t be, but here they are!
It’s like Christmas every day.
I hope you catch the bug, because your life will change. You won’t ever want to go back.
Oh, if you have no money at all, but are intensely interested in coinology, please read my blogs on how to start with zero, which is exactly what I did with my shop over the past two and a half years; I deliberately started with the following items only:
1 $25 box US pennies
1 cheap 10x jeweler’s loupe
1 used velvet jewelry pad
1 copy “Grow Rich with Pocket Change” by Potter.
And that’s it. No other outside funding went into the shop, and that’s the game exactly. All coins are to be self-found, all coins come from pocket change, circulated business-strike coins, and all altered coins are ID’d as such, “CPT”, ie; Cleaned, Polished, Toned.
If you appreciate good coins, ask for the advanced pack, at any price you care to name. I’ll make it up for you as best I can with the budget you indicate.
If you want multiple gifts at the $10 level, I can make them up for you, but you MUST give me two weeks warning. I reiterate; all coins are self-found, and I don’t always have the time to hunt for and organize and package and describe and bag up the $10 gift packs you order the night before you need them.
During holiday season, don’t expect UPS to deliver the coins faster, just because you left it to the last minute.
By the way, it just suddenly occurs to me in this day of the $50 gas tank fillup, you can’t hardly get a gift at $10 anymore, and this particular gift does NOT look like a $10 gift, and certainly the $100 Advanced Pack won’t, to the experienced collector, because it will contain very very collectible coins, all dated prior to 1940!!!
I have several orders for the $100 Advanced Gift Pack with all high-grade wheaties. I’ll soon run out of high grades, and orders are processed in sequence according to date of receipt.
I know it’s all very complicated. If you can’t work your way through this tangled mess of coin offers, call Yanesh and we’ll talk.
See You At the Top!!!
gorby